Personal

A while ago, I made a couple posts about getting a film camera. Then, I posted a couple images made from my first roll of film. However, I noticed that I had not posted anything since.

So, here are a few images taken over the past few months. I will include information on each image. The camera is a Hasselblad 503CX. I have two lenses. The 80mm, which acts as a “normal” lens on this medium format camera, and a 150mm lens, which is mildly telephoto.

Here we go…

My wife and daughter. 105mm lens. Just taken on the side of our old house.

Those crazy two again. 150mm lens, again on the side of our old house.

The whole family. 80mm lens, taken while on vacation in Georgia.

My wife and oldest son. 80mm lens. Taken outside the apartment where we temporarily stayed.

Same shot. Closer with the 150mm lens.

Some of the kids at the apartment. All taken with the 80mm lens.

This one was taken at a covered bridge close to where our new house was being built. 150mm lens.

We met family in Georgia at the Talulah Gorge. 80mm lens.

Talulah Gorge. 80mm lens.

Talulah Gorge. 80mm lens.

Talulah Gorge. 80mm lens.

Talulah Gorge. 80mm lens.

Talulah Gorge. 80mm lens.

After we left the gorge, we stopped at a little farm stand at the side of the road. That is where the rest of these were taken.

80mm lens.

Talulah Gorge. 80mm lens.

That is all for now. The weather is nice here, so I hope to get out shooting some more soon.

Field Notes are a big thing. Everyone knows about them and a lot of folks use them.

I ignored them for a long time, mostly because I was trying to do an electronic capture of everything. After reading David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done” I realized that I needed a very quick capture system, that I would take anywhere and would always have with me. After deciding to do this, I decided to use Field Notes books for this.

This is the first book I started, and I finally reached the final pages.

From the cover, I started this book on 1/24/15. It took so long for me to finished for several reasons. This wasn’t a “journal” for expanded writing. It was mostly used for quickly capturing things that ended up elsewhere, but it was the Field Notes book that I always had with me. I would write on both sides of the pages (most of the time). Sometimes, I would have multiple days on a single page.

For whatever reasons that it lasted this long, I am now ready to move to a second book. I just thought you might enjoy a few pictures of this well worn book before I retire it.

After almost a year and half of taking a trip to the Dominican Republic, I have decided to share what I think is a very powerful story from that trip.

It should not take me long to finish, and when I do, I will make the eBook available on this website. After much thought, I have decided to make it available for free. As much as I wouldn’t mind making a little cash to offsite some of the costs of writing and sharing, I felt that I didn’t want a cost barrier to being able to read this story. It is a bit short for an eBook, and a bit long for just a post.

Rather than just finish the book, post it and say “here it is” I figured it would be fun to write about the process for creating the book. Sometimes I think the process can be more interesting to people than just the finished product. Besides, there are a lot of folks who like pens, notebooks, and software, so I will take it through all those steps.

With that in mind, let’s get on with the first part of the process. By the way, I have created a new category on this website called “DR eBook” so that you can click on that category and see all the posts associated with the process without having to search for them among other entries.

Heading down there, I did not know specifically that there was going to be a “story” to capture. Because I wanted to retain as much information on the trip as possible, I bought a specific journal for this. My son had been eyeing The Hobbit Moleskine journal at the bookstore, so I bought us each one of those.

At the end of each day, I took a few minutes to write about the events of the day. Believe it or not, it was tough to squeeze this time in. We kept hopping pretty much the whole trip, and when it was time for bed, I just wanted to crash.

It would be great to say that I used some great pen to take these notes, but I did not. It was just a super cheap, black Papermate ball point pen. I like the process as much as anything else, so why didn’t I take a nicer writing instrument? Mostly because I did not know what to expect. This was going to be get dirty and work trip. I didn’t take a cell phone or electronics. The only thing I took that plugged in was the charger for my point and shoot camera battery, and I was not sure if I would even have a place to plug that in. I don’t have nice pens other than fountain pens and I didn’t want to have to worry about flying with one of those either.

The next part of the process is not something I normally do. Within a couple of days of returning home, I put my handwritten entries into the journaling software that I use. I mostly did this because I knew I wanted to expand on some of the entries and that I would also probably want these somewhere down the road.

I did not attempt to create any story, or do anything special with these at this point. As you can see from the photos, I just put the entries in day by day as they had occurred in my paper journal.

In case you are interested, the journal software that I use, and have been using for years is MacJournal. In the spirit of full disclosure, if you follow that link it I could receive money for it. I am an affiliate with the App Store, but links like these will be far and few between for me because I really only use a handful of apps. Also, I would only provide a link to things that I genuinely use. I also know that Day One is a hugely popular and similar app. Back when I started with MacJournal, I had to make a choice between the two and obviously went with MacJournal. I still wouldn’t mind trying Day One, but I have everything in MacJournal working the way that I want, that I don’t see the need to go looking at something else for the moment. As an added bonus, I write all my content in MacJournal, and send it directly to my website, but that is a topic for another time.

That is it for the “documenting” portion. My next post will be about how I came up with the parts of the story and the structure.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the doctor for the yearly physical, blood work, all that fun stuff. Today, I went back to go over the results. The doctor prescribed a couple of mediations, and I went down the hall to the pharmacy to get them filled.

It turned out that the medications were pretty much over the counter vitamins, and insurance doesn’t cover those sorts of things. So, the pharmacist is about to tell me what to look for at the drug store. I pull my Lamy 2000 out of my pocket to write down what he is about to tell me, I pull the cap off and he pulls the pen out of my hand!!! He was attempting to be nice and write it down for me, but I had that heart fell out of my chest type of feeling. Nobody else has ever used my pen before. As he went to write, it was upside down. I told him that it was a fountain pen, and he looked at it and said “Oh….” and handed it back.

If anyone would else uses a fountain pen, I know you would appreciate my story. If you are not into fountain pens, and are an outdoors person, it is the equivalent feeling of having your axe all tuned to a high polish, and then having an inexperienced person pick it up to use it without asking.

Luckily, it worked out okay for me. But, what would you have done? Would you have freaked out? Would have yelled at him? Would you cringe too?

If you are interesting in know what I like to read about, and the things I think about, I added some links in the right sidebar.

This is the stuff that I can’t get enough of. If the links have a blog, I check in regularly. If they have a book, or multiple books, more than likely I have read them or about to buy their book. If they have a podcast (in the case of the Pen Addict) I listen to it regularly.

This is the stuff that is really important to me. Casually viewed stuff did not make it there.

I am sure the list would grow. These are just the ones I could think of off the top of my head. As I do my checking in during my regular course of reading, I will add more.

I recently found out about the Cursive Logic Kickstarter. As one of my favorite writing styles, I was interested in learning more.

Our school system is still teaching cursive. My oldest in now in middle school. He learned cursive in elementary but now with classes on specific subjects I am not aware of anywhere that he has to use it. I don’t see it in any of his school work.

I asked my next youngest if she is learning cursive. She said “Yes.” I asked if she uses it and she “no, because it is hard.” That is enough for me 🙂

Luckily, I had enough time to still get in on this and I paid for a Partner level backer. If it is something that you are interested in, there are still a couple of days left, and the project became funded in the last day or so.

This week, my kids have a week off from school for their “mid-winter break.” Other than being sick of the long winter, I am not sure of the purpose of this break. I know it is something that we never used to get as kids. Regardless of “why” the kids don’t have school this week, it still leaves my wife and I with the decision of what to do during this week. Our options include:

1) I just continue to work as normal, and let the kids drive my wife nuts 🙂 It is not like it is when they are off in the summer where they can go to the beach, the zoo, historic villages, or just have them play outside. Our high temperature lately has been in the single digits and lows below zero. Even the diehards are not outside at the moment and even running errands is not fun. Doesn’t seem like the best option.

2) Go someplace warm! We would all love to do this. Unfortunately the cost of flying the whole family somewhere is insanely expensive and driving to warm weather would take at least two days. Four days of driving in a week long vacation just doesn’t seem fun. Especially with a bunch of kids asking “Are we there yet.” 🙂

3) Somewhere indoors, that is not too far, and will keep the kids entertained. So, as usual this time of year, we took the kids to an indoor waterpark for a couple of days.

If you have even made it is far, you are probably wondering why I am even writing about this. At the beginning of every vacation like this, I am overwhelmed by a very odd feeling that I wonder if other people have as well. It is basically “Is this what it is all about?” Yes, a deep question about life.

I mean, during an average work week, what I have the least of, is time. Work, Dinner, dishes, kid’s events and not to mention the dreaded homework. I haven’t even mentioned the things that I would like to do. Yet, at the first moment of getting some free time (vacation) we pay a lot of money, drive a fair distance, just to be entertained and to focus on not having to do anything. I have always been amazed at the extent that people go to do “nothing” or at least in my mind, do stuff that is not all that meaningful.

That is always my initial feeling, which is why I am writing about it. But, it usually does not take that long for me to change my tune. Why? Because we (the family) are spending time together. I get the chance to interact with everyone and yet each person individually. I get to have “moments” with each family member that quickly reminds me that, yeah…..this IS worth it.

While at first glance it may seem odd floating on a tube in a man-made channel of chlorine water as a way to spend free time, I wouldn’t give up the family moments we get to have for anything.